How did you land your first regular clients doing freelance/service work on PEI?

I do freelance web design and local SEO work for small businesses, and the actual output has been solid (site rebuilds, SEO improvements, good results for the businesses involved), but finding new clients consistently has been the hard part. Work tends to come in bursts rather than steadily.

For anyone on PEI who's built up a client base for a small service business, what actually worked for you early on? Word of mouth, local groups, cold outreach, something else? Genuinely just trying to learn from people who've solved this problem already.